Original author: Nicky, Foresight News
On March 23, 2026, a lawsuit was filed in the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York, formally naming 26-year-old Australian entrepreneur Ben Pasternak and his entities B24, Inc. and Believe Foundation as defendants.
This class action lawsuit initiated by investors Joshua Lee and Pierre Montmeas accuses Pasternak of engaging in deceptive business practices and false advertising through three consecutive token issuances and a forced migration, causing consumers to suffer losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. At this time, nearly half a year had passed since he last published original content on social media.
The core of this lawsuit points to an application in the Solana ecosystem called Believe. Believe (formerly Clout.me) is a Solana social token issuance platform launched in 2025, founded by Pasternak. Users only need to tweet “@launchcoin + token name” on the X platform to create tokens without coding, using a bonding curve mechanism, automatically upgrading to the Meteora liquidity pool once the market cap reaches 100,000 USD. The platform is positioned as an "idea crowdfunding platform," and its platform token LAUNCHCOIN once reached a market cap of 370 million USD in May 2025.
According to the complaint, Pasternak launched the token named PASTERNAK in January 2025 and publicly claimed on that day to "have 0 ownership" of the token. This statement successfully shaped a narrative of "no insider allocations," with the token's market cap once reaching 80 million USD on its first day. However, within a week, the price plummeted by over 95%, leaving a market cap of only about 190,000 USD by March 2025.
On April 28, 2025, the platform changed its name from Clout to Believe; on May 2, the on-chain metadata of PASTERNAK was changed to LAUNCHCOIN, but the token contract itself was not redeployed. The lawsuit points out that in mid-May, LAUNCHCOIN's market cap briefly exceeded 240 million USD, reaching a historic high of 0.3647 USD. After that, the price continued to decline, while Pasternak and the official account of Believe publicly promised at least twelve times during this period to initiate a "flywheel" buyback mechanism, using platform fee income to buy tokens in the open market to support prices.
On October 15, 2025, the Believe team announced a forced migration of LAUNCHCOIN to a new token called BELIEVE. Holders had to complete a 1:1 exchange by October 29, and tokens not migrated by the deadline would be permanently destroyed.
Meanwhile, the total supply of the new token expanded from 1 billion to about 1.333 billion tokens, an increase of 33.3%. The lawsuit details the allocation of the newly added tokens: about 17% allocated to current and future contributors, with a four-year vesting period and one-year lock-up; about 5% allocated to early investors, with a one-year lock-up; about 3% allocated to the foundation, with no lock-up restrictions, available immediately.
Original LAUNCHCOIN holders received no additional compensation, and their holdings were directly diluted.
The complaint further points out that on the day of the migration announcement, Pasternak publicly stated that "no individual or entity would receive tokens for at least a year," a statement that clearly contradicts the fact that about 40 million tokens from the foundation were unlocked immediately. In addition, the Believe team described the increase in supply as "25%," while the actual mathematical result was about 33%, causing widespread skepticism and ridicule within the crypto community.
In terms of the platform's economic model, Believe charges about 2% in fees for each transaction, initially split evenly between the token creator and the platform, adjusted after June 2025 to 70% for the creator and 30% for the platform. The platform also designed a "talent scout" mechanism, where the first user to trigger the launch of a token receives 0.1% of subsequent transaction fees. The lawsuit estimates that Believe handled approximately 6 billion USD in transaction volume, with total platform fee revenue of approximately 54 million USD.
As the creator of PASTERNAK, LAUNCHCOIN, and BELIEVE, Pasternak continued to earn creator fee shares from these. The complaint also notes that during the week the migration announcement was made, on-chain data indicated significant selling activity from top wallet addresses.
Pasternak's last original tweet freeze-framed on October 16, 2025. In this lengthy article, he first acknowledged that he had never purchased any Solana tokens before launching his first token, reiterated that the team did not receive token allocations during the initial issuance, and clarified the misstatement regarding the increase in supply, promising that the foundation's holdings would not be sold and that the buyback flywheel would be initiated after the migration was completed.
He retweeted a message from the official Believe account on January 14, 2026, which stated: "The idea of Believe v2 is simple: track everyone’s real-time emotions."
Updates from the official Believe account also ceased on that day, with the last tweet announcing: "New market launched: Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) is now open for trading." Since then, both Pasternak personally and the project officials have fallen silent on social media.
Believe v2 launched in January 2026 attempted to pivot to an "emotion market," allowing users to bet on the real-time popularity of public figures through a perpetual bilateral market, but failed to regain market interest. As of the lawsuit date, the BELIEVE token's market cap was about 1.2 million USD, evaporating from its historic high.
This lawsuit cites New York General Business Law § 349 and § 350, California Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law, and also makes common law claims of negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. The plaintiffs request the court to order the defendants to compensate for actual losses, return platform and creator fees, and impose a presumption of trust and injunctive relief on traceable digital assets if necessary.
Documents show Pasternak resides in Manhattan, New York, and the registered address of B24, Inc., which he controls, is also located in New York, with the platform's operations and development directed to this jurisdiction. As of the time of publication, he had not publicly responded to the lawsuit nor disclosed the specific amount he profited from the Believe project.
A Legendary Teenage Era
Before this legal storm, Pasternak's life story was nothing short of legendary. Born on September 6, 1999, in Sydney, Australia, to a Jewish family, he grew up in the suburb of Woolloomooloo. He taught himself programming at the age of 13, and at 14, he collaborated with an engineer from Chicago during a school science class to complete the iOS game "Impossible Rush" within hours, garnering millions of downloads and reaching as high as 16th place on the U.S. App Store overall chart. Media quickly caught onto this story, calling him "the next Zuckerberg."
In January 2015, 15-year-old Pasternak turned down internship offers from Facebook and Google, dropped out of high school, and flew to New York seeking venture capital. In April of the same year, he founded the youth social shopping app Flogg, securing about 2 million USD in funding from firms like Binary Capital and Greylock Partners.
Flogg's performance fell short of expectations and shut down at the end of 2016. He quickly shifted resources to a new project, Monkey, a video chat application for teenagers.
Monkey accumulated over 20 million users and was acquired by the Chinese company Holla in 2018, becoming his first successful startup sale during his teenage years.
Starting in 2018, Pasternak moved into the food tech field, co-founding Simulate and launching plant-based chicken nuggets NUGGS. The project attracted support from well-known investors like Alexis Ohanian, Jay-Z, and McCain Foods, raising over 50 million USD in 2021, with the company's valuation briefly exceeding 250 million USD. In the same year, he was named to Forbes' "30 Under 30" list.
From mobile applications to food technology, and then to Web3, every shift Pasternak made rode a wave of trends and was accompanied by significant controversy and risk. As he found himself in the midst of legal troubles, his personal life also took a dramatic turn.
Since the second half of 2024, Pasternak publicly dated TikTok influencer Evelyn Ha. Evelyn comes from the influential Korean-American Ha sisters on social media, and Pasternak frequently shared their luxurious interactions on social platforms.
However, in early April 2026, netizens discovered that the Ha sisters had simultaneously unfollowed him on Instagram, and Evelyn was later reported to be in a close relationship with a Twitch streamer. The public generally interpreted this series of actions as a signal of the end of their relationship, with some in the crypto community joking, "Finally, I can put the budget for buying Hermes back into the flywheel."
From a teenager writing apps in a Sydney high school classroom to an entrepreneur in the defendant's seat of the Federal Court in New York, Ben Pasternak, at 26, faced a dual storm of legal and emotional turmoil. He was once labeled as the "next Zuckerberg" by the media, but now his name is more associated with "fraud," "collapse," and "unfollow."
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